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Homeless

It doesn’t feel like anything else. I feel like someone who has been unconscious for years and has suddenly woken up to another reality, another world I am unfamiliar with. As everything else is so new, so alien – and since I cannot remember the past – I don’t now know what to do, or how to handle that strange feeling of emptiness inside me.

It is not similar to what I felt after the death of my father who passed away in my arms at the end of a protracted struggle with another illness. Yes, my father died at a relatively young age; still, he had lived life to the full. We knew why the illness chose him; he had called it upon himself. He had turned a blind eye to doctors’ advice and opted for a prolonged, slow suicide. But he wasn’t five-and-a-half years old. The life he had was probably longer than the life he would have had.

Luca, on the other hand, was not there yet. As the famous Turkish poet (indeed a close friend of my father) Cemal Sureya said, “every death is an early death”, but he has not had enough of life to be able to say “keep the change”. Not to mention the fact that he did not give up on the future voluntarily. There was no known cause for his disease. The angel of death, who selects one among 1 million children every year, had decided to fill his annual quota with him.

Thus, what you feel doesn’t look like what you would feel when you lose somebody you love, even one of your parents. Since the memories you have collected are limited, when you close your eyes, what punctures darkness is not happy moments or memories. The last few weeks, the last day, in fact the last night – that indescribable, excruciating last night – creep through every single hole, like a lethal chemical gas, filling the void and asphyxiating every bit of emotion it encounters. It leaves only an eviscerated, soulless shell behind.

Of course life goes on. You don’t want to stay in bed the whole day. You cannot sleep anyway. Alcohol, anti-depressants, or different combinations of these don’t work. You don’t want to stay alone, because whenever you do, the chemical gas returns. Just for the sake of living, you are obliged to get by. You try to distract yourself and build a routine that reeks of “the normal”.

And you do. You spend time with close friends who won’t make you tell the story from the beginning and don’t repeat clichés like “words fail us” or “there is no way to describe your grief” (not that they are wrong or you don’t appreciate them; they are a thousand times better than utter silence); you eat, drench your suffering in alcohol, watch the World Cup. Then, suddenly, while chatting about something trivial, you find yourself talking about him. “He loved football too. When he grows up, he’ll play football probably”, you say, and take a pause there. What did I say? Did I use past tense? “Loved football?” Did I say, “when he grows up”? But he won’t grow up. And you reach for another bottle of beer.

Even when you realise you are being emotional, in fact simply irrational, your compass is him. You want Sweden to be defeated by England for example. When they concede a goal, you rejoice. Then you remember that only a few days ago, you were rooting for Sweden – how you were explaining Swedish jerseys to him. “Like the Minions. They have the same colours as the Minions”. He laughs, feels a sudden joy. “Minions!”, he says. Grandfather, grandmother, bonus grandmother cheer for Sweden shouting, “Go Minions!” He wants to stand up, to jump. He cannot. Because he cannot stand up.

When that memory interrupts your fragile routine, your attempts to reconstruct a new “normal”, you collapse. You are instantly detached from the present, your surroundings, even the whole world. If your friends are close enough, they notice it and bring you back to the present, quietly. You return, until the next interruption.

Some time after, you start reflecting on some of the things someone you care about told you, “slowly, step by step”. Or the gentle reminders of his doctors, a mantra you have memorised over the years, “one day at a time”. That all sounds reasonable but weren’t we supposed to get rid of this when all is over, one way or another? Weren’t we going to be able to re-establish the link between the past, present and the future? Why can’t I still make plans about the future? Why don’t I want to remember the past at all?

The present? Well, it is the incarnation of Dante’s Inferno. I have already passed through the door upon which the words “Abandon all hope, ye who enter” (Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate) are inscribed. I have started travelling down the concentric circles of hell. I have been conversing with sinners and damned souls hoping to come to terms with anger and the feeling of injustice. Knowing of course that no matter what I do, I cannot bring him back.

As I know that I cannot go back home, that there is no home anymore, that I have lost my sense of belonging, the only thing I believed in, the deepest and most genuine love of my life.

The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Ahval.